More than 1,000 pages of files from the British Home Office concerning the hunger strike and death of Terence MacSwiney have been formally handed over to the UCD Archives in the presence of his only daughter, Máire MacSwiney-Brugha.
She said that she was very young when he died after 74 days of hunger strike in Brixton prison on October 25th, 1920 and did not really know him at all.
But she recalled a series of incidents when travelling abroad when there was instant name recognition about her father and his hunger strike.
For example, the porters at a small Italian railway station shouted out his name when they were told that she and her Aunt Annie, a sister of Terence MacSwiney, were from Ireland.
At the time of the celebrations for the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi, a distinguished Indian politician visited Dublin and asked to meet her. He told her that her father's hunger strike and the Irish struggle for independence had been "an inspiration and guiding light" for the Indian independence movement.
She said she had been struck by how events such as her father's death and the deaths of others during the struggle for independence had resonated around the world among countries which were part of large empires. She wondered if Irish people realised the input that Ireland had in the fall of large empires in the 20th-century.
She wondered if the time was not now suitable for a fuller study of her father's life and death. In some modern histories of Ireland he is dismissed in a few lines.
The President of UCD, Dr Art Cosgrove, accepting the papers on behalf of the college at a ceremony on Wednesday, said that they would add to the personal papers of Terence MacSwiney and those of his sister, Mary, which were already in the archives. Having these papers in one place should greatly facilitate future research into Irish history.
Dr Cosgrove paid tribute to Mr Frank Small who had been largely responsible for researching and copying all the files now released by the British Home Office.